Which leads to the question, what is natural unemployment? It turns out that, for a term that has been used a lot in the popular press, it's not a very simple idea. And, as is often the case, economists don't univers...

The national June 2017 unemployment figures were released last week, and they contain a few interesting tidbits. Historical data for the US seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate can be found at the Bureau of Labor Statistics web page for Series LNS14000000. (County-level data won't be released until July 21st.)

The headline of course is that unemployment continues to be quite low. The seasonally-adjusted rate of 4.4% means that the US has now gone 14 consecutive months with unemployment below 5...